Maxwell Johnson is a humanities instructor at Park Tudor School in Indianapolis. His newest book, A Connected Metropolis: Los Angeles Elites and the Making of a Modern City, 1890–1965, was published last month.

In A Connected Metropolis Maxwell Johnson describes Los Angeles’s rise in the early twentieth century as catalyzed by a series of upper-class debates about the city’s connections to the outside world. By focusing on specific moments in the city’s development when tensions over Los Angeles’s connections, or lack thereof, emerged, Johnson ties each movement to two or three contemporary figures who influenced the debates at hand. The elites’ previous efforts to secure nationwide and global connections for Los Angeles were wildly successful following World War II. As a result, the city became a landing spot for African American migrants, Cambodian and Laotian refugees, and Mexican and Central American immigrants. Johnson argues that the city’s history is more defined by external relationships than previously understood, and those relationships have given the history of the city more continuity than originally recognized.

Simultaneously a command post of the American empire and an outpost utterly dependent on other places both national and global, Los Angeles has confounded observers for the last century. “The city and county of Los Angeles, Calif. consists of 4,071 square miles of rocks, sand and ‘semiarid’ land in the far southwestern corner of the U.S., virtually isolated from most of the country by dreary deserts and lofty mountain ranges,” began Life reporter Roger Butterfield in his 1943 article “Los Angeles Is the Damnedest Place.” Yet, Butterfield noted, Los Angeles was an amazing success story: the fastest-growing and third-largest city in the United States, the second most productive industrial county in America, and the global center of the film industry. How did Butterfield explain such an unlikely rise? He felt its roots lay in boosterism, or in Butterfield’s words, “selling sunshine to the world.”

American urban history is replete with studies of boosterism. From Chicago’s development of its “hinterlands,” to Kansas City’s effort to gain railroad connections, to Seattle’s embrace of a “Pacific cosmopolitanism” in the early twentieth century, scholars have exhaustively examined how economic and political leaders labored to sell their cities to the world. Historians of Southern California have also focused on boosterism. To take one example, Paul Sandul finds a booster group in the “agriburb” of Ontario, California, that “saw the entire metropolis . . . or region (Southern California) . . . as the stage in which they operated—and needed to operate.” Although the elites of Los Angeles often transcended nearby borders in their economic pursuits and lifestyles, the city stood as a focal point for their ambitions. “The metropolitan synthesis has drawn from too narrow a map of metropolitan space and the politics of growth,” Andrew Needham writes in Power Lines, his study of energy consumption and the rise of Phoenix, Arizona. “Remapping metropolitan history at the regional level,” he suggests, allows historians to more comprehensively examine cities and the “disruptions” created by urban growth machines. A Connected Metropolis, therefore, seeks to “remap” Los Angeles’s history at both the regional and national levels through the stories of the powerful businessmen, newspaper publishers, and public officials who propelled its growth from 1890 to 1965.

To be sure, historians of Los Angeles have struggled to depict the broad trends of the city’s upper-class activism. They often defer to either a “sunshine” narrative of optimistic growth or a “noir” narrative of repressive social control. But Los Angeles’s upper class during the examined time period defied such easy categorization; it was malleable, transient, and variegated. “Mexican and Anglo-American landlords, transplanted Eastern and Midwestern entrepreneurs, and cinema and aerospace executives led different stages of urban development,” Frederic Jaher argues in The Urban Establishment. “Each enclave contributed to the growth of Los Angeles but was unable to perpetuate its ascendance.” So who were these people? How might they be categorized? Jaher finds an “upper class” in Los Angeles, but the constantly changing composition of Los Angeles’s wealthy, powerful group seems to resist such terminology. E. Digby Baltzell provides a more convincing term in his Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class. “The elite concept refers to those individuals who are the most successful and stand at the top of the functional class hierarchy,” he writes. “These individuals are leaders in their chosen occupations or professions; they are the final-decision makers in the political, economic or military spheres.” Baltzell’s term elite guides my analysis, as does his simple definition of the term: individuals who lead their chosen fields at the upper echelons of the class structure. Not every person portrayed in A Connected Metropolis attained the same level of wealth, though all of them were powerful. Moreover, while the elite group may have changed composition over time, certain elite institutions, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and Merchants and Manufacturer’s Association most notably, remained powerful throughout the early twentieth century and fostered remarkable collaboration. Still, whatever the broader applicability of Baltzell’s formulation, it certainly describes Los Angeles’s upper class in the twentieth century.

While many of those individuals and elite institutions engaged in boosterism, this does not fully explain the rise of the sprawling city. Indeed, boosterism is a relatively limited set of practices centered on the promotion of economic development, and Los Angeles grew from a remote frontier town in the 1880s to a global metropolis by the end of World War II because its elites moved beyond boosterism. Instead, they embraced and espoused a politics of connection, which revolved around efforts to tie Los Angeles to other places both tangibly and metaphorically. City leaders built tangible connections to secure, among other things, the water that irrigated Los Angeles’s citrus farms and flowed through its sewers, the capital that funded its businesses, and the people who migrated from the Midwest to buy its houses. To build metaphorical connections, these men fiercely debated a series of questions. How should Los Angeles interact with other Pacific World and borderlands places? How receptive should the city be to new populations? And how much should it depend on federal power?